Why so many schools started telling kids to guess at words instead of sounding them out
In the 1960's a woman in New Zealand named Marie Clay thought that good readers read by guessing at whole words from context (the words around them, the letter they start with, or any pictures).
This theory meant teachers wouldn't have to spend time drilling letter sounds, so it becomes very popular even though it's completely false.
Marie Clay's Reading Recovery program spreads across the US in the 1980s and 1990s. Teachers start telling kids not to sound out words (video example here).
Marie Clay becomes an education mini-celebrity. Other programs begin to appear, selling these same "whole-word" guessing strategies to schools.
Fountas and Pinnell (started by Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell) is one of the most popular programs and convinced many schools to adopt the "3-cueing" strategy.
In 3-cueing, students are told to use context, syntax, and pictures to guess at a word, instead of using the letters to sound it out. (You can see a video of this here.)
This "word guessing" approach becomes deeply embraced by the field of education.
Lucy Calkins is the professor who, in 1981, founded the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project institute at Columbia University’s prestigious Teachers College. She believed that kids would learn to read and write naturally, the same way people learn to talk.
This is a strange thing to believe, given that there are many, many people who can't read (1 in 3 fourth graders now can't read at a basic level) but almost no one who can't talk. Nevertheless, it becomes an incredibly popular belief and even today there are still teachers in my replies loudly claiming it's true.
Lucy Calkins loves Fountas and Pinnell's approach, and she tells teachers that all they have to do is help students acquire a love of reading. Teachers don't need to drill letter sounds, or teach kids to sound out words. They just need to build cozy reading nooks, have a lot of books in their classroom, and read to their students.
Obviously, this is an incredibly appealing idea, and through the 1990's and 2000's it sweeps through the field of education.
Lucy Calkins becomes an almost cult-like figure and holds revival-style training institutes in churches. Her supporters call her books "bibles". Songs are written about her.
But at the same time, neuroscience is advancing.
New research and brain scans make it clear that Lucy Calkins, Fountas and Pinnell, Marie Clay, and all the teachers that they trained are completely wrong. Trying to memorize whole words is briefly effective when a beginning reader only needs a few words, but quickly becomes an inefficient and ineffective way to read.
It turns out that learning 44 English sounds is way more efficient than memorizing 100,000 English words (why did the field of education need decades of neuroscience research to tell them this?)
When readers have a solid phonics foundation, their brains more easily map the connections between written words and their spoken forms (even when those written representations are imprecise like in English). With a phonics foundation, most readers only need to see a new word 1-4 times to remember it (this is called "orthographic mapping"), as opposed to trying to memorize every word as a separate "picture".
So in 2000, George W Bush decides that schools should teach reading with methods that are supported by scientific evidence. Phonics actually becomes part of the Republican party platform.
And of course this is where everything goes off the rails.
Opponents of the phonics regulation said it was just a way to push money to political cronies. Some people decided that if the Bush administration was pushing phonics, they didn't want anything to do with it.
Even today, progressive school districts tend to be much more opposed to phonics.
Southern states (Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Alabama) are switching to systematic phonics instruction and seeing good results, and progressive commentators are trying to explain those results away.
The best reporting on this entire debacle is the podcast Sold a Story. It's won a number of awards and is actually driving legislative change by exposing the absurdity of the situation.
If you want a quick video explainer, John Stossel also did a recent segment on the topic (I'm in it!)
Ultimately, the important thing to remember is that "sounding out words" didn't disappear from schools because that's what people wanted. It disappeared because people weren't paying attention.
Modern education policy (getting rid of phonics, banning middle school algebra, eliminating honors classes, prioritizing equalization instead of education) isn't happening because that's what families want.
These policies happen when families and voters aren't paying attention, and if we want schools to switch their focus back to education and excellence, it will only happen if families and voters demand it.
